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The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
Mar. 4th, 2019 08:00 pmIt's Ann Leckie's newest book! And it's SO GOOOOOOOOD!
It's. Uh. Why am I so bad at writing reviews of the books I love the most? Okay. Okay! I can do this! This is a fantasy novel, set in the same general world as many of her short stories, which I had already read and loved.
This book is written in first person, but that person is talking to someone, so it's also written in second person. Which is kind of amazing and I love how this conceit plays into how the story is told.
The "I" of the story is a rock. More specifically, Strength and Patience of the Hill, a god who is in the form of a rock. The "you" of the story is Eolo, a soldier from a rural background who is aide to Mawat, the heir of the local, uh, rulership sort of position. It's complicated. He's definitely not a prince.
Because gods have to be careful about what they say - everything they say must be true, or they will drain their power in the effort to make it true - it makes for an interesting perspective on Eolo, because Strength and Patience of the Hill can never just forthrightly assume Eolo's internal processes, so there's something of a distancing from Eolo even as he's one of the main two viewpoint characters. Which creates an interesting effect, where Eolo honestly seems more of a cipher than any of the other characters in the story, despite his actions and reactions and other people's reactions to him being firmly foregrounded, which is weird and kind of cool how it ends up working. Eolo's clearly a guy with a lot going on beneath the surface and I want to know more! (meanwhile I very early on gained an extremely good sense of the kind of person Mawat is, possibly because he's really not that complicated. Oh Mawat.)
The story goes back and forth between two narratives, which are slowly brought closer and closer together until the one leads into the other. One is Strength and Patience of the Hill's history, starting loooooooooooooong ago in ancient prehistory, through the introduction of humans, and language, and the development of religion, and what it means to care about other beings. The other is the story of what happens in the immediate aftermath of Mawat arriving back in town expecting his father to be dead very soon and himself to take up the mantle of the Raven's Lease, but instead his father has disappeared and his uncle has usurped the role. (Yes, this is something of a Hamlet retelling, and with some really fun reversals and recontextualizations!)
( Read more... )
It's. Uh. Why am I so bad at writing reviews of the books I love the most? Okay. Okay! I can do this! This is a fantasy novel, set in the same general world as many of her short stories, which I had already read and loved.
This book is written in first person, but that person is talking to someone, so it's also written in second person. Which is kind of amazing and I love how this conceit plays into how the story is told.
The "I" of the story is a rock. More specifically, Strength and Patience of the Hill, a god who is in the form of a rock. The "you" of the story is Eolo, a soldier from a rural background who is aide to Mawat, the heir of the local, uh, rulership sort of position. It's complicated. He's definitely not a prince.
Because gods have to be careful about what they say - everything they say must be true, or they will drain their power in the effort to make it true - it makes for an interesting perspective on Eolo, because Strength and Patience of the Hill can never just forthrightly assume Eolo's internal processes, so there's something of a distancing from Eolo even as he's one of the main two viewpoint characters. Which creates an interesting effect, where Eolo honestly seems more of a cipher than any of the other characters in the story, despite his actions and reactions and other people's reactions to him being firmly foregrounded, which is weird and kind of cool how it ends up working. Eolo's clearly a guy with a lot going on beneath the surface and I want to know more! (meanwhile I very early on gained an extremely good sense of the kind of person Mawat is, possibly because he's really not that complicated. Oh Mawat.)
The story goes back and forth between two narratives, which are slowly brought closer and closer together until the one leads into the other. One is Strength and Patience of the Hill's history, starting loooooooooooooong ago in ancient prehistory, through the introduction of humans, and language, and the development of religion, and what it means to care about other beings. The other is the story of what happens in the immediate aftermath of Mawat arriving back in town expecting his father to be dead very soon and himself to take up the mantle of the Raven's Lease, but instead his father has disappeared and his uncle has usurped the role. (Yes, this is something of a Hamlet retelling, and with some really fun reversals and recontextualizations!)
( Read more... )
